Along with the growing availability of high-quality games, the generation and viewership of high-quality recordings of gameplay sessions, particularly with high-level players, also has seen significant growth. A typical gameplay session in modern action-oriented games (e.g., e-sports) can last several hours at a time, and unabridged recordings of even moderately lengthy game sessions can easily consume significant storage space (e.g., several Gigabytes). Moreover, potential viewers of gameplay session recordings may prefer not to view an unabridged recording, especially when durations of high(er) interest or activity (e.g., durations associated with a relatively high(er) level of action) are dispersed throughout the recording between durations of low(er) interest or activity (e.g., durations associated with a relatively low(er) level of action).
One conventional attempt at improving viewer engagement with gameplay session recordings is to use a video editor to manually customize such recordings for viewers, for example, to create an abridged recording collecting manually curated video clips having only highlights of gameplay sessions (e.g., containing only video clips of high(er)-action durations of the gameplay session). However, editing gameplay recordings in this manner requires significant time and resources on the part of the game player and/or the video publisher. Further, the video editing process can introduce significant delays between a live gameplay session and the availability of an edited recording for viewing. Additionally, for heavily edited sessions (e.g., videos that prioritize brevity), key information related to the gameplay session—such as user activities occurring during gameplay prior or subsequent to a manually selected video clip—is lost in a recording abridged in this manner. As a result, the abridged recording may not accurately reflect the gameplay experience related to the live gameplay session.